by Kile Smith | Sep 2, 2022 | American music, Fleisher Collection, Fleisher Discoveries, Music Composition
She founded a pioneering group for women composers and a successful independent record label. She taught in Tennessee, Hawaii, Jakarta, and Vienna. But what made Nancy Van de Vate happiest was composing—for orchestra. Nancy Van de Vate (b. 1930). Distant Worlds, for...
by Kile Smith | Nov 29, 2017 | Broad Street Review, Choral music, Music Composition
[First published in Broad Street Review 28 Nov 2017 and reprinted by permission.] It was 2015 and I was staring up at another deadline. The art-song group Lyric Fest, with whom I was enjoying a season as their first resident composer, had asked me to write a work for...
by Kile Smith | Aug 25, 2016 | American music, Broad Street Review, Choral music, Composition, Music Composition
[First published 23 August 2016 in the Broad Street Review, and reprinted here by permission.] We weren’t related, not any more than any other two random Smiths are, and I met him only once, but Gregg Smith, in three ways, made me a composer. Smith died in July at the...
by Kile Smith | Apr 20, 2016 | Broad Street Review, church music, hymn, Music Composition
[First published 19 April 2016 in the Broad Street Review, and reprinted here by permission.] My ten-year survey of traffic patterns on Broad Street — coinciding with Broad Street Review’s tenth anniversary — is now complete. Within a four-percent margin of error, I...
by Kile Smith | Oct 28, 2015 | Broad Street Review, Music Composition, Uncategorized
[First published in Broad Street Review, 27 Oct 2015.] The sound a rooster makes is the sound a basement door makes when it is earnestly trying to open, and the sound a car makes when it is vainly trying to stop, just before the crash. It is jackals at night. It is...
by Kile Smith | Nov 30, 2014 | church music, Composition, Music Composition
NewMusicBox, the online publication of New Music USA, handed the guest-blogger reins over to me for the month of September 2014. Of all the things we pondered wherein I might contribute, church music was an underserved area I could help fill in, NMBx thought, for this...
